Pee #2 - PASSION

To paraphrase Clara Peller: Where's the Passion?

If Purpose = attraction potency, then Passion is attraction romance. It is all the heady stuff that comes with young love. It's buying flowers and sending notes. It's thoughtful little gifts left on the car seat and playful little nibbles on the ear. It's inside jokes. It's ironing a blouse when no one asked you to.

What's Passion? It's what happens when the people responsible for an attraction sincerely care about what they are creating. You could say they've fallen in love with it, or you could say they've been drinking the Kool-Aid.

A few important things about Passion:

1. It can happen anywhere. Passion can happen in design. It can happen in operations. It can happen at the top of the organization or it can be a grass-roots thing that emerges at the most junior positions.

2. Passion can work miracles. It can make meager budgets seem big. It can make impossible timelines work.

When you consider what the WED folks were able to accomplish in the 1950's and 1960's, well, let's just say its insane by today's standards. Timelines were incredibly compressed. Staff was small, especially the core team. But incredible things happened because people cared. Consider It's a Small World and the work involved. Not just design but translating that to set fabricators, general contractors, robot-builders, lighting guys. Add in things like songwriting and audio production for this whole mess. And a new ride system.

Forget the tired "jokes" about the song, you'd be proud to have created a legacy attraction like It's a Small World.

It's a Small World was built in one year, from concept to opening. This accomplishment is a testament to the prowess of the Disney organization. But the real take-away is the result: It's a Small World remains one of the most pure, most resonant theme park attractions ever. The people who created it had passion.

3. Passion is contagious. It can spread within an organization. This happens when an individual or a group brings an energy to a new project. It can also happen when someone in operations demonstrates that they care and shows their colleagues the results of this kind of attention.

Passion can also "infect" the audience. One of the best examples of this is happening now at Holiday World in Santa Claus, IN. This tiny little park has created a buzz for itself by adding great attractions, maintaining a clean-as-a-whistle operation, and making the place a value for consumers. It is clear that the Koch family and the folks they employ really have a passion for what they do. And in the past eight years or so, the audience has caught on. I first heard about Holiday World through word-of-mouth, from someone who went and just fell in love--not from some marketing machine.

Zat you, Santa Claus?

4. Passion forgives a lot of mistakes. When an attraction is lavished with attention and caring, folks give the little gaps and edges a pass.

One of the clunkiest attractions I ever knew was the original Center of Science & Industry--COSI--in Columbus, Ohio. It was this weird thing that had crammed its way into an abandoned county building. It opened in the mid sixties and over the next four decades collected the most random exhibits, from see-thru German women to walk-thru exhibits from the 1964 World's Fair to a freakish band of half-scaled Presidents of the United States to a display of every Cracker Jack toy EVER MADE. Oh yeah, they had a troupe of rats who played basketball also.

COSI: This is the future, at least as it looked in Ohio in the 1970's

It was cluttered and disjointed. Show quality was all over the map. Wayfinding was a mess and the adolescent kids in the audience always smelled like they needed deodorant. But you knew the people who were running this place cared. There were shows all the time. There was always something new (not always fresh) being added. The place was a great success in its original, pre-1999 form.

5. Passion matters to guests. This is the key thing to remember. Guests can smell passion and, as importantly, they know when planners, designers, and operators are just phoning it in. The gawd-awful reaction to Disney's California Adventure is in part because the people visiting can tell that this is not the loved-on Disney they expect but an off-the-shelf amusement park laid out by mall developers. I never visited the failed Wild West World in Kansas but its no surprise that place tanked. Just looking at the images the place screamed "County fair rides at theme park prices."

So, if Passion is so darn important, why don't the people that are investing millions of dollars on attractions "get it" and insist on it, just like they insist on ADA compliance and toilet seats? My answer: you can't insist on Passion. You only get that from certain folks and, even then, only when they can really feel it for the job they're working.

Today, you go to Orlando, or Southern California, and you'll find that demand for service employees is pulling resources like taffy. The volume of new attractions being developed internationally is doing the same thing with designers and engineers. Passion--where it exists--is being stretched thin. Toss in the fact that some things are really just hard to care about (you can only design so many attractions about XYZ characters, you can only bang the corporate gong so often before you go into a mild coma) and it is no wonder that so many projects are delivered stillborn.

Passion has never been easy. It's sometimes cheap. But if you can find it, you should sure as hell do whatever you can to keep from losing it.